Details here.
It’s the rare academic who sees his research implemented on a grand scale right in front of his eyes; and on Jan. 6 John Eastman’s mind must have been racing – as a mob enabled by his, er, bullshit attacked the Capitol – at the thought of the massive raise his university would be giving him to reward his remarkable research productivity. He imagined the school’s admiring pr write-up: “The John Eastman Theory of Vice-Presidential Powers is now routinely taught in jurisprudence classes across the nation, and indeed across the world.” Jacob could call it bullshit all he liked, but the shattered windows and bloodied police just down the street signaled a hugely important turn in human history, and he, John Eastman, had single-handedly made it happen. Forget his dinky academic gig – we’re looking at Attorney General… Supreme Court Justice…
As the mad Constitution-bomber’s disbarment proceeding gets underway today, let us recall exactly what he said about overthrowing the Republic.
One charge alleges Eastman violated California Business and Professions Code Section 6068(a), failure to support the US Constitution and laws.
I assume the proceeding is private; here’s hoping we have access one way or another to testimony.
This is the nature of bathrooms: They are inherently intimate and embarrassing places. I have always regarded the human acts that occur behind their doors to be the great equalizer, a moment of parity for our species. There, every king and queen, every president, every rock star, every billionaire who has been to space and the rest of us mere mortals behave in the exact same, unspeakably disgusting human way. They are one of the places we are most vulnerable; this is why so many of them have locks. The chandelier hanging in [Donald] Trump’s toilet was his dynasty in a microcosm: something opulent and gaudy, a caricature of wealth that screamed for our attention, while hoping we would not notice any potentially dirty deeds happening below.
As long as fools like the people who used to run Hamline University are around, we will need to keep worrying about assholes like DeSantis running the country. Places like Hamline write his The Woke are Destroying Us scripts for him.
The now-deposed prez of that school – taking a page from the idiots at Oberlin – reflexively attacked a professor for showing students images of Mohammed. A theocrat in the class squawked; the school verbally attacked/fired/ruined the career of the prof; the rest of us, who understand democracy, rose up as one and made all the idiots go away; and now it’s all over but the school-crushing legal settlements (Oberlin’s attack on an innocent party cost it thirty six mill).
The AAUP really went after them. Good.
Commencement at MAGA takeover site New College, Florida will be… interesting. Student response to having a MAGA maniac shoved down their throats as speaker has been to organize an altogether alternative event.
Students seem to have hoped for $20,000 or so in donations toward renting a space, catering, etc., but in only a few days the number has zoomed to over $122,000 (note that I have to keep changing this number; nothing like theocrat bullies to get the bucks flowing), so they are now collecting not just for the event but for other fuck DeSantis activities.
UD donated $100… I can’t think of a purer act of local democratic/intellectual resistance than this ingenious counter-staging. Here’s hoping the representative from Hillsdale College will be speaking his lies into a void.
Or, even better, to a bused-in crowd of not-yet-jailed January 6 insurgents who will hoot and holler throughout, and then – cuz it’s a college – set all the school’s books aflame in an enormous bonfire.
[A]ny other trial outcome would have emboldened the nation’s militia movement and congressional firebrands like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green and Jim Jordan. To date, Jordan’s attempts as House Judiciary Committee chair to attack prosecutors and the FBI have flopped. Had the Proud Boys been acquitted, however, those previous political stunts would have looked like warmup acts for future theatrics alleging the Justice Department was prosecuting innocent Americans.
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How cool for Green and Jordan to be mentioned in the same sentence with the militia movement!
And don’t forget the capo di tutti capi!
With these latest foot soldiers’ convictions, the baton now passes to special counsel Jack Smith and to Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis to complete the task by bringing accountability to the very top.
“Fizzled” is nice.
[Current] legislation weakens the current civil rights safeguards and allows the government to keep public transportation closed on the Sabbath and separate men and women in educational and public institutions. Not to mention that the religious parties are continuing to press for an ultra-nationalist agenda, including the building of new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, which they want to annex to Israel…
[The] growing influence of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox and ultra-nationalists could lead at some point to the annexation of the occupied Arab territories, with Arabs constituting at least 50 percent of the population in the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. That raises the specter of Israel turning into a third-world Middle Eastern country, that, like Lebanon would be ravaged by ethnic and religious wars.
Israel’s shocking disintegration proceeds apace.
A recent Gallup poll gives greater detail to a back and forth UD and her buddy Rita had not long ago about whether college applicants might begin avoiding schools in states with medieval abortion laws. Looks as though they well might.
“The fact that 74% of Republican unenrolled adults say, ‘I would consider enrolling [in] a state that had greater access’ is, I think, a really impressive number,” [an official at the Lumina Foundation, which cosponsored the poll,] said.
And, you know, it ain’t just abortion. Some representatives in zero-abortion, lock ‘er up, execute her, states are now moving on to trying to ban non-standard sexual practices, contraception… And what sort of … emotional reality do you suppose pertains in campus health clinics in the nation’s Junior Anti-Sex League territories? Many students show up with an STD now and then – or maybe anxiety about an STD – and I wonder how comfy they’ll be discussing such matters with whatever medical crew hasn’t yet run off to New York? With a crew that thinks zygotes have voting rights and unmarried women who aren’t virgins are sinners? This isn’t about abortion only; it’s about sex, sexual ethics, sexual ethos, sexual conversation, sexual atmosphere. “[T]he University of Idaho [has warned] employees that promoting abortion while on the job could be viewed as a felony offense.”
“If you go to a state that doesn’t allow you to have autonomy over your body, then that is not only not appealing, that is offensive to many women,” [the Lumina official] said.
UD ain’t denying that there’s a minority of women who’d revel in the repression of their bodily autonomy, who’d get off on lectures from campus doctors about the importance of keeping their legs clenched. But she thinks it’s a very small minority.
[C]ollege applicants are looking closely at the cultural climate of places where they could spend four—or likely more—years studying and exploring their lives as young adults. Red states were already having a tough time attracting talent among students and professors alike, and veering to the right on abortion is only going to make retaining their rankings and prestige more difficult.
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[An] exodus of college students from states with abortion bans could join a string of other consequences that abortion bans have brought, amid reports the laws have also driven physicians out of states where they face the threat of felony charges for providing care, impacted recruitment and training at medical schools and caused employees to seek transfers to different states.
The unbelievable events in Israel continue.
Can you blame them? Hope it’s fine champagne, left over from New Year’s festivities. Party on, Dems.
Lake of Kari: After Wordsworth Like a breeze, Or sunbeam, over your archive I passed To a sanctions motion without pause; for ye have left Your screenshot with me, an insane accord Of paranoias - massive, and endowed In their mad viciousness with power as will allow A gracious, almost might I dare to say, Virtuous, and profitable, victory.
[E]veryone thought that shifting the battle on abortion to the states would help anti-abortion groups. But in fact, what we’re seeing is that abortion rights groups are starting to rack up victories ...
[B]allot initiatives are turning out to be a real point of success for abortion rights groups...
[I]n Vermont and California, voters approved ballot initiatives that would explicitly establish a right to abortion in those state constitutions...
[Michigan] voters overwhelmingly said we want our state constitution to protect a right to abortion...
[T]here were three red states — Montana, Kansas, and Kentucky – [where] anti-abortion groups thought that voters of those red states would come out and say absolutely not. We do not want abortion. And in fact, in all three of those states those [anti-abortion] measures failed...
[B]ecause of the abortion issue, Democrats are actually making some gains in state legislatures…
Democrats now control the Pennsylvania legislature. That’s enormously important for access [to abortion], not just for Pennsylvania, but for women in West Virginia and in Ohio, where abortion is banned, because women from Ohio and West Virginia have been flooding into Pennsylvania to seek abortions...
In another example, look at Minnesota. There, the state Senate flipped the Democrats. They have control of both chambers of the legislature, plus the governor’s office, for the first time since 2013. And Democrats are really taking that as a mandate to achieve their legislative priorities. And that means they could do a mini Roe, essentially putting the protections of Roe into the state constitution...
[In Utah,] language written to defend polygamy is now language that is being used to defend abortion, and it’s working…
… I don’t think it’s what anyone expected when they wrote that constitution…
Republican legislatures may want to oppose abortion, but Republican voters, as in Wyoming, often have sort of a libertarian streak and think like, you know what? A decision to have an abortion is really up to the woman. I don’t want to interfere with that...
[W]hat we’ve seen in the last six months is that when you take abortion away or threaten to take it away, voters are going to come out to protect access to it…
[B]e careful what you wish for when you overturn Roe because [advocates] actually have something that might be even stronger up [their] sleeves...
[W]hen you put the right [to an abortion] into a state constitution, in most cases, it’s less contorted because when that right goes into the state constitution, it’s generally much more explicit than in the federal constitution. And when you put it in the constitution, you can make it much more expansive...
So take Michigan for an example. The right to abortion that was established by that ballot initiative that passed is far more expansive than anything that was in the US Constitution, far more expansive than Roe. It gives women control over the entire spectrum of choices in their reproductive health. That’s huge...
That’s not just sort of inserting the language of Roe into a state constitution. It’s not some sort of mini Roe. This is like maxi Roe. This is Roe on steroids..